The Cutting Room: Goodnight Mommy

August 6, 2015

August 6, 2015

In the heat of the summer lays a lonesome house in the countryside where nine year old twin brothers await their mother’s return. When she comes home, bandaged after cosmetic surgery, nothing is like before and the children start to doubt whether this woman is actually who she says she is.

Why we’re looking forward to this: Goodnight Mommy is a German language chiller that ticks several of our boxes for great movie ingredients. There’s the isolated location, because whenever we’re taken to somewhere that’s in the back of beyond we just know that nothing good is going to come of it.

There’s the twins element, which as anybody who’s seen The Shining (and we’re guessing that’s most of you reading this) knows are inherently creepy anyway, and especially when they’re displaying the kind of strange behaviour that Goodnight Mommy’s Elias and Lukas Schwarz are in the film’s trailer.

Then there’s the identity question which is always good for throwing up scares and red herrings alike. Just who is this person that says they are your mother? It’s difficult to know what to believe when she’s undergone cosmetic surgery and doesn’t even look like your mother any more, not to mention the strange things she’s started doing that aren’t in character with the woman who brought you into the world.

Goodnight Mommy looks to have hit upon an interesting combination of the above tropes and could well turn out to be an effective little film.

Goodnight Mommy hits US cinemas in September and should make its way to the UK not long afterwards.

RICHARD COSGROVE

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